On Fri, Jan 11, 2002 at 10:22:20AM +1300, Roger De Salis wrote:
1/ Organisation is pretty much a 12 month cycle (not to say you can't do a smaller one in less time.)
Damn - my attention span has been clocked at under 10.7 seconds. Seriously though. I don't doubt for a minute that this is a long term job, and as such needs the right sort of person to organise it.
2/ Guest overseas/celebrity speakers (from 1-3) usually want business-class airfare plus free accomodation.
Greedy bastards. S/t I think this could be relaxed. None of the companies they work for will be flying them business class at the moment so why should we.
3/ Organisors, who usually work for nothing, like have their accomodation paid. (But this need not be the case)
One Maui Camper van comming up S/t If you like the idea enough to volenteer to organise it, then you were probably going to come anyway. So then you would have been paying for your accomodation anyway. So no one should mind paying. QED
I believe most companies would stump up for this. There are severe limitations in the number of establishments that can deal with 50-150 people, and they typically want 12 month notice of bookings.
Yep - this I think will be an issue. We might want to look into this as a phase 1. it might effect some of the scaling decisions that Donald is talking about (single vs multiday, independant vs schlepping off uniforum)
I'm sure Cisco, being the gorilla of the Internet industry would be keen to participate, by providing an overseas speaker, and other companies would no doubt contribute in like fashion. The principle reason for finding a sponsor is to stump up the hotel deposit.
One tShirt with a slow knuckle-dragging, hairy, drooling gorilla named Cisco comming up =) S/t I don't think Speakers will be a huge problem. I think that doing them for cheap, and getting companies to just fork out disposable cash might be a bit harder. But who knows.
I think the technical conference in NZ is a worthy one, but I would put more emphasis on getting managers of Telco's along, simply as it is an opportunity for them to understand a little more of the technical side, and perhaps it is also an opportunity for the techo's to understand the management drivers.
<t-i-c> Telco's are some of the most technical and intelligent people that I know. They have recently been shown to make EXCELLENT networking decisions. I think they would be a great asset to any conference audience. </t-i-c> Having said all this I guess the thing that I'm worried about the most is that we start too big and it tanks. We are then left with the "Nah, we tried that once but it didn't work" All good points man. Esp the ones about how expensive and time consuming the organising is. Dean - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog